Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Winds of War: Is Islamization the New Finlandization?

Like my blog, Norman Podhoretz's new book, "World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism,"posits that we are back in 1938, appeasing the latest dictator with global ambitions. He gives good examples of how appeasement, like in 1938, is the order of the day. But he does something else. He gives us an insight into a strategy of the Islamists learned from the free world’s Cold War adversary – the Soviet Union.

In 'World War IV', Podhoretz makes the first serious effort to set 9/11 itself, the battles that have followed it in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the war of ideas that it has provoked at home into a broad historical context. Through a brilliant telling of this epic story, Podhoretz shows that the global war against Islamofascism is as vital and necessary as the two world wars and the cold war (“World War III”) by which it was preceded. He also lays out a compelling case in defense of the Bush Doctrine, contending that its new military strategy of preemption and its new political strategy of democratization represent the only viable way to fight and win the special kind of war into which we were suddenly plunged.

In his article at the Wall Street Journal entitled ‘The Case for Bombing Iran’, he covers the usual ground of how Iran will be responsible for World War IV. But what I like is his comparison, not so much between World War II and now, but between now and the Cold War – or World War III. With it, he gives us another way to look at how the Islamo-fascist threat is playing out in Europe.

Not surprisingly, the old American foreign-policy establishment and many others say that these dreams [of Ahmadinejad ] are nothing more than the fantasies of a madman. They also dismiss those who think otherwise as neoconservative alarmists trying to drag this country into another senseless war that is in the interest not of the United States but only of Israel. But the irony is that Ahmadinejad's dreams are more realistic than the dismissal of those dreams as merely insane delusions. To understand why, an analogy with World War III may help.

At certain points in that earlier war, some of us feared that the Soviets might seize control of the oil fields of the Middle East, and that the West, faced with a choice between surrendering to their dominance or trying to stop them at the risk of a nuclear exchange, would choose surrender. In that case, we thought, the result would be what in those days went by the name of Finlandization.

Podhoretz describes Finlandization as the process of “Communist parties coming to political power so that they could establish "red Vichy" regimes like the one already in place in Finland--regimes whose subservience to the Soviet will in all things, domestic and foreign alike, would make military occupation unnecessary.”

In the United States, where there was no Communist Party to speak of, we speculated that Finlandization would take a subtler form. In the realm of foreign affairs, politicians and pundits would arise to celebrate the arrival of a new era of peace and friendship in which the Cold War policy of containment would be scrapped, thus giving the Soviets complete freedom to expand without encountering any significant obstacles. And in the realm of domestic affairs, Finlandization would mean that the only candidates running for office with a prayer of being elected would be those who promised to work toward a sociopolitical system more in harmony with the Soviet model than the unjust capitalist plutocracy under which we had been living.

This is a perfect description of the Left then – and now – in league with the Marxists then and the Islamists now.

Looking at Europe today, we already see the unfolding of a process analogous to Finlandization: it has been called, rightly, Islamization. Consider, for example, what happened when, only a few weeks ago, the Iranians captured 15 British sailors and marines and held them hostage. Did the Royal Navy, which once boasted that it ruled the waves, immediately retaliate against this blatant act of aggression, or even threaten to do so unless the captives were immediately released? Not by any stretch of the imagination. Indeed, using force was the last thing in the world the British contemplated doing, as they made sure to announce. Instead they relied on the "soft power" so beloved of "sophisticated" Europeans and their American fellow travelers.

The British lion was emasculated. The response from the free world?

As if this show of impotence were not humiliating enough, the British were unable even to mobilize any of that soft power. The European Union, of which they are a member, turned down their request to threaten Iran with a freeze of imports. As for the U.N., under whose very auspices they were patrolling the international waters in which the sailors were kidnapped, it once again showed its true colors by refusing even to condemn the Iranians. The most the Security Council could bring itself to do was to express "grave concern." Meanwhile, a member of the British cabinet was going the Security Council one better. While registering no objection to propaganda pictures of the one female hostage, who had been forced to shed her uniform and dress for the cameras in Muslim clothing,Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt pronounced it "deplorable" that she should have permitted herself to be photographed with a cigarette in her mouth. "This," said Hewitt, "sends completely the wrong message to our young people."

Can you spell ‘cultural castration’?

As with Finlandization, Islamization extends to the domestic realm, too. In one recent illustration of this process, as reported in the British press, "schools in England are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils . . . whose beliefs include Holocaust denial." But this is an equal-opportunity capitulation, since the schools are also eliminating lessons about the Crusades because "such lessons often contradict what is taught in local mosques."

Podhoretz shows that the process of Finlandization extends to other European countries too.

But why single out England? If anything, much more, and worse, has been going on in other European countries, including France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands. All of these countries have large and growing Muslim populations demanding that their religious values and sensibilities be accommodated at the expense of the traditional values of the West, and even in some instances of the law. Yet rather than insisting that, like all immigrant groups before them, they assimilate to Western norms, almost all European politicians have been cravenly giving in to the Muslims' outrageous demands.

As in the realm of foreign affairs, if this much can be accomplished under present circumstances, what might not be done if the process were being backed by Iranian nuclear blackmail?

Ahmadinejad does not shrink from describing as 'a world without America,' [or for the short run] a world without much American influence." Either way, Iran will see its plans of Islamizing the world come to pass with the assistance of the same allies of old who declare Islam a religion of peace and a “sociopolitical system more in harmony with Muslim demands than the unjust capitalist plutocracy under which we had been living.”

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